Matteo Lucchini

In these last few years many fields in astrophysics have been advancing at an amazing rate. One of the fastest has been the study of the so-called “fast radio bursts” (or FRBs). As the name implies, FRBs are flashes of radio emission that happen extremely fast – down to a few milliseconds. This short duration […]

This is going to be a hard post for me to write, and for everyone to read. It will not discuss science, because today I want to talk about something that I think is far more important.TW: sexual assault discussion below. My main hobby is PC gaming, and many of my favorite games (Starcraft 1

Today I will be previewing a neat result me and Tom have been working on for the past few months. It’s going to be a bit more technical than my usual post, so please bear with me. In September 2017, a new black hole X-ray binary called Maxi J1535-571 was discovered, and Tom started observing

Today’s story starts in 1967, at the height of the Cold War. The US Air Force has been using its Vela satellites to monitor any traces of gamma-ray radiation, a dead giveaway of nuclear tests being conducted on Earth. The goal is to make sure that the USSR is complying with the 1963 Nuclear Test

Today I’ll be writing about the very first topic I ever did research in, during my Bachelor’s thesis: Tidal Disruption Events (or TDEs), or the most dramatic way in which a star’s life can end. Before getting into cool astrophysics stuff, let me remind you of how tides (roughly) work. Because of gravitation, the Moon

In this post I thought I’d write a bit about my Master’s thesis, which eventually (thanks to a good bit of luck, as you will see) led to my very first paper. During my master’s thesis I worked (together with Fabrizio Tavecchio and Gabriele Ghisellini at the Merate Observatory, near Milan) on understanding the properties

The first paper of my PhD thesis was accepted on Friday for publication on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and it was posted on arXiv yesterday! If you’re interested in jets and how to be clever with data to learn more about them, check it out! https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11341

For this blog I thought I would talk a bit about my favourite telescope (yes, I have one of those…). As Dimitris talked about last week, detecting high-energy radiation can be complicated. X-rays for example are blocked by the atmosphere, so if you want to look at astronomical sources emitting X-rays you need to put

I’m Matteo Lucchini and have been working as a PhD student in Sera’s group for almost two years now. Like everyone else in the group I focus on figuring out what black holes do, but for this blog post I thought I would write something a little different (and ever so slightly romanticized). Very often,